


Somnus

by julie_slamdrews



Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/F, Fluff, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 09:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30070089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julie_slamdrews/pseuds/julie_slamdrews
Summary: Five times Cathy accidentally fell asleep on/around the other queens (and one time it wasn't an accident).
Relationships: Anne Boleyn & Catherine Parr, Anne Boleyn/Catherine Parr, Anne of Cleves & Catherine Parr, Catherine Parr & Jane Seymour, Catherine of Aragon & Catherine Parr, Katherine Howard & Catherine Parr
Comments: 16
Kudos: 46





	Somnus

**Author's Note:**

> This is possibly the fluffiest thing I have ever written (although it has a couple of angstier moments because I'm apparently incapable of making things purely happy). 
> 
> The +1 section is an expanded version of a throwaway line from my fic Night Off. It should make sense without having read that fic, but if you want more context you'll find it there.

_one_

The house was almost completely quiet when Cathy emerged from her room. She wasn’t sure what day it was, what time it was. Daytime definitely, unless she’s been locked away so long that she’d missed some kind of apocalyptic event where the sun started shining at night. (Although that seemed increasingly plausible, now that she thought about it.)

The only sound in the house seemed to be coming from the kitchen, which, conveniently, was where the coffee lived and therefore where she was going. Inside she found Jane, humming absently to herself as she rolled out pastry, a podcast playing quietly in the background.

“Hello love!” She said, glancing up with a smile as Cathy shuffled in. “Haven’t seen you in…”

She trailed off, her brow furrowing. Apparently Cathy wasn’t the only one struggling to keep track of time.

“What are you making?” Cathy asked, nodding to the pastry. It might be best if Jane didn’t think too hard about how long it had been since she last left her room.

“Just some jam tarts,” Jane shrugged, although the saucepan of homemade jam on the stove suggested there would be nothing _just_ about them.

“Like the Queen of Hearts!” Cathy said, delighted. “Do you know some people think she might have been based on Queen Victoria? Or Margaret of Anjou?” She frowned. “Probably best not to talk about the Queen of Hearts in front of the others…beheadings and all that…”

Jane’s puzzled look indicated that her explanation had perhaps not been quite as clear as she might have wanted. She sat down at the table, rested her chin on her hands, tried to think how she might express herself better. It was surprisingly difficult. The kitchen was warm, the light soft, the voice of the podcast still playing in the background slow and soothing. It had been, she reflected, quite a long time since she last slept.

This was the last thing she remembered before she woke, several hours later (probably, she still wasn’t convinced time wasn’t trying to trick her), her head pillowed under a pair of (clean) oven gloves, a single jam tart on a plate beside her.

_two_

Anna had been trying to get the other queens to partake in physical activity for weeks, the trouble being that none of the sports they’d enjoyed in their former lives were particularly accessible now. Riding, at least, had remained popular, but until their first round of show earnings came through that remained rather out of budget.

Kitty had been the most amenable, not only agreeing to morning runs with Anna but actually professing to enjoy them. Anne was also easily enticed by anything remotely dangerous, and the two of them came back from a roller skating expedition telling stories which made Jane shudder and Catalina remind them that if they couldn’t dance they couldn’t work so she’d appreciate it if they kept all their limbs intact.

Cathy, however, had resisted all of Anna’s efforts until she arrived in her room one morning extolling the relaxing effects of yoga. Cathy opened her mouth to protest that she didn’t need to relax, saw Anna’s eyes flick to the shredded remains of a stack of research notes which currently littered her desk, and found herself agreeing to a yoga class instead.

It turned out that Anna was entirely wrong about yoga. It wasn’t relaxing, it was _hard_. It seemed to consist entirely of putting your body into a series of progressively more uncomfortable positions and then holding them while your limbs shook and your muscles burned and the irritatingly perky woman on the YouTube video flashed her unnaturally white teeth at them and reminded them to _breathe_.

Just when she was considering hurling her yoga mat right at Yoga Lady’s smug face and storming off, they moved onto a position that she could manage. Lying on your back, eyes closed, listening to Yoga Lady’s Texan drawl (which was somehow less irritating now, and infinitely more soporific). And then she wasn’t on the ground anymore, she was in the air, a quiet creaking indicating that she was being carried upstairs, and she probably ought to mention that she wasn’t actually asleep anymore and that she was in possession of a working pair of legs but it was easier to just…not.

“There we go, Schatzi,” Anna said as she laid her down on the bed, a hand smoothing her curls. Now she really ought to mention that she was awake, except she had the feeling she might not be for much longer. Perhaps yoga was a little relaxing after all.

_three_

Switching up the dressing rooms had been Jane’s idea, some kind of ‘bonding activity.’ Normally Cathy would have been all for anything that brought them closer together, and sharing with Kitty shouldn’t have been a hardship - Kitty was, after all, about as inoffensive as it was possible for a person to be.

It had just been a long week. The internet had been far too exciting recently so she’d had even less sleep than usual, her head was buzzing with something that was threatening to become an idea but wouldn’t quite make itself known yet, and under these circumstances any change to her usual routine made her chest feel tight and her skin itchy.

But she couldn’t say so without hurting at least two sets of feelings so here she was, shifting uncomfortably in place and trying not to snap as Kitty picked up and examined what seemed like every item in the dressing room.

“What do you usually do in the breaks?” Kitty asked at last, once she had handled every single object in the room.

Cathy shrugged. “Read, I suppose. Drink coffee. What do you do?”

Kitty’s eyes sparkled. “All sorts of things!” She said, and really Cathy ought to have known, given the sounds of endless merriment emanating from the cousins’ dressing room.

“Do you do anything…quiet?” She asked hopefully.

Kitty pondered this for a moment and then her face lit up with a grin. “We could build a blanket fort!”

“A blanket fort?” Cathy addressed the question to the empty air where Kitty had been standing. The younger girl was now a blur of motion, dragging chairs across the room and draping fabric over curtain rails until something resembling a Bedouin tent had been assembled in the centre of the room and an impatient-looking Kitty was beckoning Cathy inside.

“What now?” Cathy asked, once she was curled on the heap of cushions that made up the floor of the ‘fort.’

“We tell each other stories sometimes,” Kitty said. “Anne makes up the best ones, but I can remember most of them. Shall I tell you one?”

“That sounds nice,” Cathy agreed, surprised to find that it did. Snuggled onto the cushions with the blankets muting the harsh dressing room lights, she already felt significantly more relaxed than she had just minutes before.

Kitty began to recount a tale which Cathy was fairly sure she remembered as the plot of the awful movie that Anne had convinced her to watch a week or so earlier. Before she had a chance to properly cross-reference though she was asleep. She’d have to ask Anne to confirm later.

_four_

Thursday night movies with Anne had become something of a tradition. It had started early on, when they had both been scared and homesick and out of sorts, and had found comfort in judging fictional characters’ life choices (and in the close proximity of someone who understood). It had never exactly been agreed that they would do it again, but Thursday night invariably found them both on the sofa after everyone else had gone to bed.

Anne always picked the movie and it was always terrible, but Cathy found that she didn’t mind. Watching Anne enjoy them, watching her react and hypothesise and question, was a pleasure all of its own.

Tonight’s movie, though, seemed to be eliciting fewer reactions than usual. And from what Cathy had watched of it (in truth, she spent more time watching Anne’s face than the screen) it seemed more boring than shocking.

After a while Cathy felt herself begin to droop. She kept blinking and shaking herself, but gradually her head crept closer and closer to Anne’s shoulder until finally it rested there.

She was about to shake herself again, maybe get up and make some coffee, when Anne gave a little contented hum and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her in closer. She was wide awake now, every nerve ending tingling, but also with absolutely no desire to pull away. So she stayed, breathing in Anne’s light scent of rose and honeysuckle, until the pull of sleep overwhelmed her again.

(She spent the next week frantic with worry over whether she’d drooled on Anne in her sleep, but she found herself drooping back towards Anne on their next movie night all the same, even though she wasn’t particularly sleepy.)

_five_

It had not been a good week.

Her editor had come back to her with more changes than she’d expected and nothing she did seemed to make anything better and she’d missed a cue in the show on Tuesday and though the others had told her that she was absolutely not to go on Twitter under any circumstances she had, just for a few minutes (and a few minutes had been more than enough), and basically everything was BAD.

She’d bailed on movie night with Anne because she really needed to get these edits done and Anne had said she understood, of course she had, but now she was giggling with Kitty on the other side of the wall and Cathy had a horrible feeling there would be no more movie nights ever again.

As she was staring at her laptop screen so hard it was blurring in front of her eyes, and wishing the giggling would just stop for a minute so she could concentrate, there was a knock at the door.

“I’m working!” She shouted, possibly a little too forcefully, certainly forcefully enough to scare whoever was on the other side away.

Except she hadn’t reckoned on her godmother, who completely ignored her shouting (or at least came into the room despite it).

“Is that your latest book?” She asked, peering at the laptop. Cathy scrambled to cover the screen with her fingers.

“It’s not ready yet,” she squeaked, and Catalina drew back.

“Sorry mija, didn’t mean to pry. I’m so looking forward to reading it when it’s ready though.”

“It’s not _going_ to be ready!” Cathy exploded, slamming the laptop shut with a satisfying crash. “Because I’m never ever ever going to get these edits done!”

She was prepared for the pep talk that would follow, prepared to let Catalina know all the reasons why she was wrong and actually she wasn’t a good writer at all, she was a fraud and soon everyone would know it. But her godmother didn’t deliver a pep talk, just settled herself onto the bed and started examining the stack of books on the bedside table.

“I’ve been meaning to read this one, mija!” She said, holding a volume of poetry aloft.

Cathy had never before heard her godmother express an interest in poetry, but she found that she was too tired and wrung out to argue. Instead she pondered, not for the first time, whether Catalina might have some kind of magical powers, as her godmother somehow managed to open the book to Cathy’s favourite poem.

“There’s a certain slant of light…”

Cathy wanted to protest that she knew exactly what her godmother was doing and she was too smart to fall for it. But the bed did look very soft and Catalina was doing that sneaky thing with her voice that always seemed to calm her down even when she didn’t want to calm down. These were underhand tactics and they would have to discuss it.

Later though. She might let her read a few more poems first.

_+1_

It was only just after midnight when Cathy closed her laptop and set about preparing for bed. She could normally have got at least another three hours of good work done, and then perhaps another two of work that was at best tolerable and at worst so typo-riddled and incoherent that she would have to delete it all the next day. It felt strange to be pulling on her pyjamas and cleaning her teeth while sound and light still drifted in from elsewhere in the house.

Only Anna’s room was dark and silent. She could hear quiet conversation coming from behind Jane’s door and a screech and thump from behind Anne’s that suggested she had decided to rearrange her furniture again. Her godmother’s room was quiet, but a strip of light still shone underneath the door.

“Can I come in?” She asked, poking her head around the door, and at Catalina’s answering nod she bounded into the room and made herself comfortable on the bed. “I thought I might sleep here tonight.”

Catalina looked from Cathy to the clock and then back again. “Sleep here…now?” She crossed to the bed, a hand already reaching out to feel Cathy’s forehead. “Are you feeling alright querida?”

“Fine,” Cathy said. “Just sleepy.”

She tried faking a yawn, which just made her godmother’s expression turn from concerned to suspicious. “Did Anne send you in here?”

“No!” Cathy protested. “I haven’t even talked to Anne tonight!”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. Well, the second part was, she had talked to Anne about the show and about the issue she was having with her research and about the fact that bees could fly at fifteen miles per hour. They hadn’t talked about Catalina though. Not really.

(Anne might have confirmed a few suspicions she’d had about who exactly had been upset earlier. But she hadn’t sent Cathy anywhere. Cathy was here entirely of her own volition.)

Catalina didn’t look at all convinced by Cathy’s display of innocence, but she climbed into bed and wrapped her up in her arms anyway so she couldn’t be _too_ cross. Cathy yawned again, a real one this time, snuggled closer.

(Now she wasn’t lying about being sleepy either. Her conscience was clear.)


End file.
